Industry veteran Dean Hall has rolled out Brutal, an open-source game development framework made in collaboration by two of his companies, Ahwoo and RocketWerkz.
The tech is built in C# and is free to use, even in commercial games. It has no royalties; developers only need to list a Brutal copyright notice in a game’s credits. Work on Brutal started in 2022 and has already been used in six projects across three different studios; these include RocketWerkz’s Kitten Space Adventure and the new Waylith engine that powers Ludeon Studios’ Rimworld. Kerbal Space Program creator Felipe Falanghe is also building something with Brutal.
In an extensive post on Reddit, Hall emphasised that Brutal is not a game engine, but a framework. That being said, you can make games directly using the tech, as RocketWerkz did with Kitten Space Agency, or developers can use it to make their own engine, as Ludeon Studios did.
The core of Brutal is a custom interoperability layer which gives C# “access to native APIs and libraries”. There are a number of libraries that support this. Hall adds that Brutal has been created with an “obsessive focus on reducing allocations and unnecessary overhead”, with the core focus being “doing a few low-level things extremely well”.
Part of the motive behind creating Brutal is what Hall sees as engine giants Unity and Unreal “consistently fail to be held accountable to developers”.
“I think this problem could get much worse as agentic workflows begin undermining the competitive advantages that have protected established software companies,” the DayZ creator continued.
“My concern is that as those advantages erode, the companies involved will increasingly look to extract more revenue from developers who feel they cannot switch. Whether through royalties, subscriptions, or more restrictive licensing.”
Hall called out Unity’s myriad issues with developers, as well as Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney, whom the RocketWerkz boss says is a “powerhouse of a programmer”, but feels has fallen foul of chasing the latest trends, such as the metaverse and AI, while developers were “struggling with performance, stability, and the practical consequences of decisions made by engine vendors”.
On the topic of developers feeling trapped or beholden to huge corporations, Hall continued: “Imagine your ability to work on your own game depending on a decision made by a company you have absolutely no control over. Now, I don’t think any of this means developers should abandon Unity or Unreal tomorrow. For many projects, they’re absolutely the right choice, and I’m not pretending Brutal could replace what they provide. But I think we’ve created an industry where the default is to become dependent on a few enormous technology companies, and we’ve increasingly accepted that as inevitable. It isn’t inevitable.
“I think we’re going to see many more frameworks like Brutal emerge in this environment. Not because everyone will abandon existing engines, but because the cost of making alternatives is going to fall dramatically. I hope those alternatives are free. BRUTAL won’t solve all of the industry’s problems, but for some developers it might offer a lifeboat.
“This technology is a small step towards changing the balance of power. If the tools are public, if you have the source code, and if you’re free to build your own systems on top of them, you have options. And if one day we stop being accountable to developers ourselves, they should have the ability to fork the framework and go their own way. That’s important to me.”